Living the dream ?

 "Maybe we should move to France?"

It was a thought that had been going around inside my head for a while.We were sitting at the table in our house in Poole, glasses of wine infront of us, a busy day over, just relaxing.

 At that time I was running my own landscaping business, working predominantly in Sandbanks,once a quiet, residential  area that had become a magnet for footballers and developers. I was part of that re-development in a small way, breaking out and removing old gardens and front walls, and replacing with new stonework, creating ponds, patios, waterfalls and rockeries, slowly destroying the fabric and eventually the community that had once existed. Now new money was coming in, and many of the old residents were moving out ,selling to the highest bidder and making a new life somewhere that having a Porsche on the drive wasn't a basic necessity.

Olivia, my wife, was nursing full time, we really were ships that passed in the night, childcare was the baton we passed ,between us, our parents , friends and to be honest anyone else we could draw into a frenetic world.
We had decided to move from our two and a half bedroom end of terrace house into somewhere bigger to allow the children a room each, which as they were boy and girl was becoming an issue.

We had the house valued, and the reality of the Sandbanks effect hit us ,it was now worth double what we had paid for it just a few years earlier, great....but so was every three bed roomed house we looked at, not so great!

So what to do, either submerge ourselves into a larger mortgage, work longer hours, maybe ask the postman to drop the kids off at school. It was a path most of our friends were taking, ok, maybe not the school run postman part , but was there another way?

My brother had moved to France a few years before,I had moved him towing a heavily laden caravan behind an equally laden truck. I remember asking "Are there any steep hills between Cherbourg and your new house in Normandy?"

"No" he said.

This conversation came back to me as I changed down into first gear, the truck screaming as we crawled along at five miles an hour up the seemingly never ending climb from the french port!
We arrived some hours later to what can only be described as a shell, in fact the farmer ,who had owned  it  explained his reasons for sale as,

 "Not suitable for the cattle anymore"

This was my first experience of the British obsession of potential , looking past the ruin that sat before them , and seeing how the property could be....after a huge amount of time and money had been lavished upon it.
It was something the French had picked up on , and now what would have been a store for hay became a 'petite maison' perfect for renovation!

My brothers hay store, boasted lovely views and seclusion, but unfortunately no power ,running water, or drainage. To shower there swiftly climbed up the list of necessities , after returning  a couple of times on the ferry looking and smelling like we had been living ....well in a cattle shed for a week ! We solved the problem by pulling alongside the toilets in the village, running a hose in , and filling a water butt as quickly as possible, while trying not to look to shifty. Then away we went laughing like naughty schoolboys, back to the house, and with a generator, pond pump,and shower head.... voila... clean, if a little cold.

We worked on the house, for me it was when I had a few spare days, for him it was full time, and we transformed it into warm, secure, home. My brother began to take on small renovations for friends,and if there was stonework required I would arrive at Cherbourg with a bag, of hammers and chisels, never easy to explain at customs,  and work on the jobs with him. They were good days, and I began to see France not as a tourist but as another working environment, and also another life.

These thoughts and ideas stayed with me, surfacing if life in Poole became tough, and then burrowing back in during the good times.The house was the final straw ,it triggered the same response from both of us, maybe there was a way out ,maybe we could live the dream, a larger house, garden, plenty of work and quality family time.We weighed the pros and cons and decided....yes we were moving to France!